ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the role of Spiritualism in contemporary America, with a special focus on three mediums in central Ohio. These include a Spiritualist reverend who has been able to talk to ghosts since childhood, the head of a Christian Spiritualist church in downtown Columbus, and a medium who channels a variety of beings ranging from the Prophet Muhammad to Vishnu and Quetzalcoatl. From its origins in the nineteenth century with the famous Fox sisters at a small farmhouse in upstate New York, Spiritualism has largely been a “folk” practice, associated as much (if not more) with children, women, African-Americans, and other non-elite groups as with philosophers and intellectuals. Typically practiced in the home through technologies such as séances and Ouija boards, Spiritualism was always and continues to be a popular and domestic religion. I employ Leonard Primiano’s concept of “vernacular religion” to examine these three mid-western mediums. As Primiano argues, vernacular religion is not simply another version of the “folk” set in opposition to “official religion;” rather, it problematizes the very idea of an official religion and asks us instead to study “religion as it is lived; as human beings understand, interpret, and practice it.” The Spiritualists’ “talk with the other side,” I argue, is a “vernacular” practice in a twofold sense – at once a “lived practice” and a unique way of speaking with and about the divine.
